Tuesday’s debate between President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris “could be one of the most consequential presidential political debates in American history,” Brett O’Donnell, one of the GOP’s top debate consultants, told the Washington Reporter.

O’Donnell is widely considered the top messaging and debate coach in either party. He’s coached over 100 candidates, including Mike Pompeo, President George W. Bush, Boris Johnson, Senators Tom Cotton (R, Ark.), Marsha Blackburn (R., Tenn.), Gov. Ron DeSantis (R., Fla.), and more. He previewed what to expect from this week’s debate, and what Trump and Harris need to accomplish, in an interview with the Reporter. 

“While the last debate was probably the most consequential to this point because it ended Joe Biden’s candidacy, this one may surpass that because it is the only major event that the public will have access to learn about Kamala Harris between now and the election,” O’Donnell said. 

Trump should be mindful of his body language during the showdown, he added. “Any little thing Trump does that sends a message that he’s attacking her for anything but policy will be magnified by the press to his disadvantage,” O’Donnell said.

Trump’s task, O’Donnell said, is simple: “make the election a referendum on the Biden-Harris policies, and against the liberal policies that she holds, and how they would do damage to the country.” Harris’s job is to “make it a choice election between Donald Trump and herself, and to present herself as a better alternative to what she thinks is an unlikable Donald Trump, which means she has to focus on persona and personality, because it’s hard for her to run on policy.”

Harris’s problem is that “people don’t like her policies, and they think she’s liberal.” The vice president also had to recalibrate her debate prep, after ABC News refused her team’s request to change the debate’s agreed-upon rules. The “biggest landmine” that O’Donnell sees for the Democrat now — after she’s changed her tune on a number of policy issues — is “debating herself.”

“She has switched a ton of her policy positions, and she’s gaslighting the American public on her liberal views,” he said. “On top of that, Harris also, from time to time, has these moments where she doesn’t know the answer to a question…and she ends up producing an incredible word salad that is not only meaningless, but confusing. There’s a big chance for Donald Trump to back her into corners on policy, and have her produce one of those word salads that then takes on its own life in the coverage of the debate.”

Harris’s most memorable debate performance came in June 2019, when the then-presidential candidate condemned Joe Biden as a racist. 

Below is a transcript of our interview with Brett O’Donnell, lightly edited for clarity.

Washington Reporter:
How important is this debate? 

Brett O’Donnell:
The stakes are extremely high for this debate. In fact, this could be one of the most consequential presidential political debates in American history because Kamala Harris has only been a candidate for a few weeks and people know essentially nothing about her. And so while the last debate was probably the most consequential to this point because it ended Joe Biden’s candidacy, this one may surpass that because it is the only major event that the public will have access to to learn about Kamala Harris between now and the election.

Washington Reporter:
You’ve prepped for a lot of these debates. What are the strategies each side uses to determine what the rules are?

Brett O’Donnell:
You’re always looking to develop a set of rules that advantages your candidate. The biggest things that were the sticking point in this debate were the microphones, and whether they would be muted. I think that was a dead giveaway that Kamala Harris intended to pursue the same strategy that she did against Mike Pence, which was to needle him, try to get under his skin, and she wanted the microphones open so that when Trump reacted to that, his comments would be easily picked up by the mics and by the press. That gives away what part of their strategy was. I still think it’ll be their strategy, but I think it did advantage Trump to have the mics muted during the first debate, because it kept him from doing those things, and it made him more disciplined, because he had to get his answers in the time that was allotted, and he couldn’t be talking while Biden, at that point, was talking. Now, he won’t be able to talk while Kamala Harris is talking because it won’t get picked up. So it advantages Trump in this debate. 

Washington Reporter:
How many people have you prepped for debates?

Brett O’Donnell:
It’s over 100 for sure.

Washington Reporter:
What’s the importance of film? How much do past performances predict how candidates are going to behave in these debates?

Brett O’Donnell:
A lot, because people are who they are. You can change some things about their behavior, but by and large, their personalities are what they are. People can’t change themselves, they’re human beings. Past film is a good predictor of future behavior, especially when you’re not doing the kind of debate prep that we might do, for example, in our firm. Past film study is a very good predictor of what Kamala Harris will do, and if you watch the debate with Mike Pence, I didn’t think she was all that likable. She was pretty good though, she was a good debater in terms of arguments, but most importantly, she tried to play up the sort of mansplaining, ‘don’t run me over or talk over me’ card in that debate to highlight some of the things about Pence and Trump by using that strategy. 

Washington Reporter:
Walk us through what it means to do debate prep.

Brett O’Donnell:
When we prep a candidate, it’s making sure, first of all, that we have a message that we will push throughout the debate, because all debates are about message pushing and connecting with an audience. It’s making sure we know what particular moments we want to have in the debate, whether it’s a clever line that catches press imagination, or it’s a an exchange we want to have with the opponent, and gaming out how that would happen so that it maximizes our advantage in the debate and makes us look like the winner. The objective in a debate is to have a message that gets received by an audience and that’s connected to that audience, to have moments where you exercise competitive advantage through some clever line or exchange with your opponent, so that the press focuses in on those exchanges positively in their reporting about the debate itself. And you back up from there and plan those. 

Washington Reporter:
When you are watching the debate tomorrow, what are you looking for in terms of body language and overall performance?

Brett O’Donnell:
I’m going to be watching if the debate stays focused on policy or if it shifts to personality. If you notice in Donald Trump’s performances across lots of debates, he’s done multiple general election debates, but he’s also done a lot of primary debates, Trump can talk about policy, but sometimes he shifts and talks about personality. In this debate, it’s to his advantage to talk about policy and to show how Kamala Harris is misleading the public about her specific policies now, and tying her to the policies of the Biden administration. His job in this debate is to make the election a referendum on the Biden-Harris policies, and against the liberal policies that she holds, and how they would do damage to the country. That’s his task. For Harris, it’s to make it a choice election between Donald Trump and herself, and to present herself as a better alternative to what she thinks is an unlikable Donald Trump, which means she has to focus on persona and personality, because it’s hard for her to run on policy. The last four years, in my opinion, have been a disaster. So she has to run on the fact that she’ll bank on folks not liking Donald Trump. The problem for her is that people don’t like her policies, and they think she’s liberal. 

Washington Reporter:
What landmines do you see for Harris that you think that she should be cognizant of? 

Brett O’Donnell:
The biggest landmine for her is debating herself. First of all, she has switched a ton of her policy positions, and she’s gaslighting the American public on her liberal views. If she ends up trying to figure out her view on a particular topic and try and triangulate, as we used to say in Bill Clinton-speak, I think that could present a huge problem for her. But on top of that, Harris also, from time to time, has these moments where she doesn’t know the answer to a question, she doesn’t know how to message an answer, and she ends up producing an incredible word salad that is not only meaningless, but confusing. There’s a big chance for Donald Trump to back her into corners on policy, and have her produce one of those word salads that then takes on its own life in the coverage of the debate. 

Washington Reporter:
What are you expecting in the aftermath of the debate? 

Brett O’Donnell:
The liberal media has been so in the tank right now for Kamala Harris that they’ll make lemonade out of lemons regardless of her performance, because her performance is going to

be bad in a different way from that of Joe Biden. Joe Biden was just incapable of doing the debate, and so there was nothing that the press could do with that. With her, she is competent enough to make it through the debate, that I think they’ll salvage whatever she does in the debate and try to put a positive spin on it, because she’s their candidate. This is the person they have to trust to try to win the election, and so they’re going to be with her.

Any little thing Trump does that sends a message that he’s attacking her for anything but policy will be magnified by the press to his disadvantage. Those are things that I would expect in the wake of the debate. 

Washington Reporter:
There’s no way we can talk about debates without talking about the Biden and Trump debate. Was that a miscalculation by the Biden team? 

Brett O’Donnell:
The cynic in me wants to believe that the Democrats pushed Biden to scheduling that early debate for this very reason, to see if he could do it, and if he couldn’t, replace him. But nonetheless, the Biden campaign either was delusional or they just believed that he could go in and hold his own, but that was a complete and utter disaster. It fulfiled the one principle of debates, which is that you can’t win an election and election in them, but you can lose it, and that is what he did.

Washington Reporter:
How did you get into this line of work to find yourself as the go-to debate consultant for the Republican Party? 

Brett O’Donnell:
I was a college debate coach at Liberty University in college, and was a faculty member there. Karl Rove came to speak. I knew John Kerry had a former college debate coach working for him and I told Rove: ‘you need a college debate coach to help George W. Bush.’ A few days later, Karl Rove called me and asked if I was serious, and I said ‘sure,’ and the rest is history. That’s how we got into this. The thing that makes our approach different is our ability to combine the notion of message, policy, and audience together in a way that helps candidates understand how to approach these not just as exercises in debates, because they’re not really debates, but as a way of furthering the narrative of their campaign. I think we do that better than anyone else.

Washington Reporter:
Which type of debate were you coaching? 

Brett O’Donnell:
Two-person policy debate. 

Washington Reporter:
Thanks so much for your time today.